My conversation with Ike Yard’s Stuart Argabright may have taken place several months ago (in preparation for their landmark reunion show at Ithaca’s Lost Dog Lounge), but I’ve only just now had the chance to post our conversation in its entirety. I know it looks quite long, but trust me, it’s a fascinating read and completely worth it: Stuart talks about everything from the fall of no wave, the rise of electro and synth-pop, and his thoughts on today’s trendy NYC bands — Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Gang Gang Dance — as well as the recent fetishization and mythologization of no wave and punk culture. Stuart also talks a great deal about his own projects, of course, including Ike Yard, Death Comet Crew, the Dystopians, and Dominatrix.
If you want an exclusive first-person account of the NYC underground of the past three decades, you may enjoy this interview almost as much as I enjoyed conducting it — it is difficult to imagine a more insightful, well-versed, or knowledgeable person to describe the period. Pearls from the lips, for a solid hour, and now here is the transcript.
But first, the article from Ithaca Times that appeared just prior to the Ike Yard reunion show in Ithaca:
“In the age of digital downloads, music blogs, and Internet hype, it is not unusual for an underground band to become instantly popular decades after the group has ceased to exist. It is also not unusual for material to be salvaged from the studio vaults and to be re-released to wide acclaim. But how often will the audience have the opportunity to see the same band perform live again, and to hear its members debut new material with a vigor and sense of purpose undiminished by time?
This Friday, when NYC underground experimentalists Ike Yard come to the Lost Dog Lounge, that is precisely what Ithacans will have a chance to see: the first live performance by a legendary band who have not performed publicly for twenty-five years.
From 1980 to 1983, Ike Yard were one of the rare few on New York’s Lower East Side who emerged from the local punk and no wave scenes but who fused that energy with the fresh electronic sounds coming from the streets of New York, Europe and the UK. Under the influence of German bands such as Can, DAF, and Kraftwerk, but spiritually akin to the irreverent electronic approaches typified by Sheffield (Cabaret Voltaire, Human League), and acutely aware of hip-hop, Ike Yard produced a sound that remains to this day quite literally ahead of its time.
In the early 1980s they signed to the now-legendary Manchester UK record label, Factory Records (home to Joy Division and New Order), and were the first US band to release an album on that label (A Fact A Second, 1982). During this period Ike Yard were also performing alongside the likes of New Order, Jim Jarmusch, Suicide, Ut, Judy Nylon and Lydia Lunch, and were as much a part of the fabric of NYC music culture as anyone recording in the city at the time.
But like others of the day, they were also taking cues from other aesthetic sources. Two of the band’s members, Fred Syzmanski and Michael Diekmann, resided at Brown University’s McColl Studio of Electronic Music, where they studied the compositional techniques of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and the experimental music and film practices of the day.
Meanwhile, percussionist Stuart Argabright was exploring early drum machine technology, scrap metal, analog synthesis, and various other procedures for polishing their sounds with a sleek urban sheen. Within the no wave scene, Ike Yard were a band who were distinctly intellectual and complex. Yet at the same time, Ike Yard’s blend of beatmaking, electronics, and analog processing created a unique sound that was, as Argabright calls it, above all, “body music” — rhythmic, physical, and danceable.
After Ike Yard’s dissolution in early 1983, its members went on to work in a host of other projects, including Dominatrix, who had an underground hit in 1984, and Death Comet Crew, which featured NYC hip-hop vanguard artist Rammellzee. In more recent times, Argabright was asked to curate last year’s New York Noise Vol. 3: Music From the New York Underground 1977-1984 on Soul Jazz Records. Argabright’s contribution, as it turns out, has been widely lauded for unearthing a number of hard-to-find gems from that period.
We recently talked with Argabright about his move to NYC in 1978, his involvement in the no wave scene and early electronics, and the reunion of Ike Yard in the 21st century.”
The Interview
Popcorn Youth: You once said that you weren’t sure if there was a ‘no wave’ scene in any organized way, but looking back on it now, from a historical perspective, it appears to some observers that there was. You also said that you doubted that anyone actually called themselves ‘no wave’ at the time. Could you elaborate on that?
Stuart Argabright: Well, I might have been generalizing, but I never heard anybody going around saying, “Oh yeah man, I’m a no waver!” Or, “Oh man, I’m in a no wave band now!” (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: To listen to people talk about that period now, one gets the sense that there was a tight knit community among many of the people involved. To what degree did people in that creative community identify themselves as a group, if they did at all?
Stuart Argabright: Well, the insiders knew and the outsiders were screened out of it, to some extent. I think that to the insiders, the people who knew, they knew what club to go to, where to have coffee, different things that might be associated with the nightclub scene. You also had artists who knew which galleries and which performance places to hang out at. It was pretty coded within the people in the community.
You could set some parameters and say that below 14th St. into Tribeca was the area geographically, and you could probably put something on it age-wise as well. But it was pretty loose. Within the quote-unquote “no wave” years themselves, every year it changed a lot. There was one moment when Judy Nylon turned Brian Eno on to the whole thing, and they ended up making the album No New York. But no one was walking around saying, “I’m in no wave,” they were quite possibly too busy living it.
Popcorn Youth: How did the community react when Eno stamped his take on the scene with No New York?
Stuart Argabright: Well, that’s a little bit complex to answer. In the liner notes to New York Noise Vol. 3, you’ll see Judy Nylon’s story and how she basically was the one who had the antennae out on the scene, and was able to scout groups, to digest groups and enjoy the groups within groups. When Brian came along, he was able through her to turn the idea of making a compilation into a reality, and so it became ‘his’ compilation.
I’ve heard that there was a further turn of events once Lydia Lunch was involved. Lydia only wanted to do certain groups, and not what she called “Soho’s arty groups.” So that changed the complexion of the whole thing. I think that was unfortunate, but it seems to have happened.
Just one of the many stories I heard behind the scenes, and which I was privy to by being friends with Judy for years, and hearing her side of the many stories, whether it was the creation of ambient music or the creation of No New York: there were women there first, I’ll put it that way. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: In compilations such as New York Noise Vol. 3, one gets a true sense of the eclecticism ascendant at the time. Aesthetically speaking, was there anything that united all of these groups under the banner of no wave? Or, as I suspect, was it more complicated than that?
Stuart Argabright: Well, I think that I could easily answer it either way. I could say that there was nothing that held anybody together, or I could say that there were a lot of things that held certain parts of groups and scenes and friends together. The major unifying factor was being in New York City at that time. It was very poor and very torn up, very ravaged and very destroyed-feeling.
I got here in the spring of 1978 and I missed the blackout, but the place was still smoking by the time I got here. It was pretty decrepit, really. I remember feeling like I had walked into a black and white movie. I got off the D.C. track at Penn Station and walked into the East Village. I think that a lot of people were magnetized into the city at that time, and probably the economics were one major factor tying the people and scenes together. There were empty spaces, and cheap places to live, to use as laboratories for bands to grow, all around downtown. Geographically, we created an area. And then seeing the same people day after day, night after night, we started to create some connections.
After that, people experienced a bit of a free-for-all period, whether it was post-punk or no wave, whether it was more strictly noise, or even some kind of ‘rock’ or coming out of avant classical things. There were very mixed-up lines, there were many ‘let’s try this’ freestyle modes (I believe Brian Eno called them ‘research bands’). I still don’t think that there really ever was a unified no wave scene at all. There were show bills, concerts, and get togethers among the ‘regulars,’ sure, but it was ‘catch as one can’ and day to day, completely on the fly.
The eclecticism of Noise 3 was an attempt to portray the period when the main ‘no wave’ groups had splashed and coincided with the first availability of simple, cheap electro toys and synthesizers. Robin Crutchfield’s move from playing keyboards in DNA to, say, his next unit, Dark Day, with “Hands In The Dark,” is a move into much starker and chillier ground. The subtitle I operated under while compiling the music was ‘Post no wave / Proto electro.’
Popcorn Youth: What brought you to NYC in 1978?
Stuart Argabright: All of the pages of CREEM and other magazines that I had ripped out of certain issues and had all over my walls, down in Washington D.C., bands like Television.
Popcorn Youth: So it was for the music?
Stuart Argabright: It was for the music, yes. I was growing up in the Washington D.C. area, and I got out of high school in ‘76, when the Sex Pistols and punk were starting to come in, and already Television and Patti Smith and those people were playing in New York. It was really attractive and not so far away either, so it was a pretty easy choice to say “bye bye!” to the family and come up to New York City. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Why do you think this thing that we are calling ‘no wave‘ was so short-lived? Or does it just seem that way in retrospect?
Stuart Argabright: Well, I think it was very short-lived. If there was an identifiable no wave period, I know that by coming in spring of ‘78, I had already missed the beginnings of it. I was able to catch the middle, toward the end, of shows and stuff that spanned the end-time of some those groups. We’re talking about the core groups, like, say, James Chance and the Contortions, Lydia Lunch, Mars, and early DNA.
They competed with the ends of a bohemian New York, too, Beat-type people, extremes of noise, extremes of art performance. Sometimes in that zone, there was still something bohemian and there was still a whiff of beatnik-ness around the quote-unquote “no wave” community. Recently, there might have been a “no wave night” somewhere, and you would hear what a person would be wearing if it did happen. Hopefully, it hasn’t happened like that yet, the way that it happened with electroclash a few years ago. Where it was like, “Alright, I’ve got my thin tie… check.” Well, you just know, that’s really not going to make it.
In general, what was really great about that moment was that just then, a really big mix of those threads began and, very soon thereafter, other young people who were coming up at the same time as myself, like Michael Holman (of Gray), invited DJs like Afrika Bambaataa down to the Mudd Club. And then the next important cross pollination happened. People today need to be aware of that moment, to know that it happened.
It was no longer about nearly all-white intellectual-types making a certain kind of music. It became all colors mixed up: early old school hip-hop, electro, free-style; studio-process-oriented music rose up as well.
If anything, no wave was a spirit and a mode to be in, which was being ‘anti.’ And I think that comes up time and time again, and it’s a positive thing when it happens. There has to be an ‘anti’ force going on at all times for change to become possible.
At the time, some people ran together in crews and cliques, but it wasn’t really so hard-carved as “this was the beginning of no wave” or “this was the end.” Some other people like Lydia or James Chance or even Judy Nylon may be able to state a harder and faster beginning and end than I would, but to my own view it was kind of a transitory state.
Popcorn Youth: One really gets the sense today that the period of which we are speaking encompassed not just music, but also film, visual art, literature, fashion. There were many different discourses interacting. Could you talk about what that dynamic was like, as someone who lived it in real time?
Stuart Argabright: At the beginning of Ike Yard, I was involved with Cyndy Schneidau, a woman in the “Downtown 81” movie, and we decided to make a movie together. I had never made a movie before, but she had, so we got some people around town, some crew from “Downtown 81,” and it was very easy to say, “Alright, let’s make a movie.”
So you definitely have to embolden your spirit to do it, because someone down the hall or the woman living downstairs might be making one herself. It was in the air, it was easy to do. It was still cheap, and certainly after punk and their DIY thing, the US punk and the UK punk as well, it just reinforced that it was about time to do something. So anybody who came to town as, say, an artist, had also to become a musician or filmmaker and vice versa for other mediums as well.
You saw people who had perhaps gone to school at RISD or someplace like that, they might have majored in this or that, but when they came to New York, they “majored” in something else. Someone like David Byrne who was an artist, but then got into music.
Popcorn Youth: Or my personal favorite, Kim Gordon.
Stuart Argabright: Yes, Kim must have been sniffing the breeze and realized there was more happening here. (Laughs) She came to join the whole thing.
I think that the real magic at the time in New York was that it was still a place to dream and set up new identities. It really was a free-for-all. There was Jim Jarmusch who was in the group Del Byzanteens, and he had already done a movie or two, and it was really in the air, at that moment. It was cheap, and it was easy for everyone to do at least one or two or three different types of art and often at the same time.
Popcorn Youth: You put together extensive liner notes for New York Noise Volume 3 and the Ike Yard re-release. They’re lovely documents and very informative. Have you ever felt an obligation or duty to take on the role of historian of that musical moment?
Stuart Argabright: Well, I’m coming from a place of having been here and having done quite a few things with quite a few people. I also try to set the record straight, from my view, as well as to try to let everyone hear a little bit more of the street level of what was really going on, what was interesting, and why it built out in a certain way.
There’s not a huge amount of documentation of the era. I mean, if you’ve seen “Downtown 81” or “Wild Style” or a couple of other movies, the odd Schnabel-centric version of NYC of “Basquiat” and other media about the period, even in the 90s, a clichéd view of the 80s emerged, I think. That view has changed over time, and as a person who was very much involved in that period of 1980s music and art culture in New York, I’d like to see the positive collaborations and interactions receive more attention, to be highlighted, rather than be relegated to a blip on a VH1 special.
In terms of music from 20 years ago, there are quite a few stories to tell. The Ike Yard story touched upon many different sub-genres and many different groups of people. The New York Noise project is a bigger continuum that I set out to do, in which I wanted to sum up the ends of no wave, as well as the freestyle and electro stuff that was coming out.
I also have a book that I’ve been working on that will be coming out, which is basically diaries of every day and night of the 80s. And that’s quite detailed.
Popcorn Youth: When can we expect to see that?
Stuart Argabright: I’m not sure yet. I’m still working on different deals and figuring out exactly which media I want to do it in. I have all of the diaries, and I also have hundreds of pages of footnotes for different things that happened on different days. Again, the same kind of momentum and reason to do it is to let people see how often we all did go out, where we went out, who went out and what we did every night. At the beginning of 1978, you had the downtowners like Arto Lindsay, Ikue Mori, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell, and Jim Jarmusch — among others as contemporaries. Then shortly thereafter we were mixing it up with John Robie and Afrika Bambaataa—a whole ‘nother group of people. And within a few months, perhaps a year later, there was yet another batch of people coming in, going out, or falling off.
A few seasons were just hectic and crazy. Then, I feel, a part of the club scene became a little warped by people like Andy Warhol, who came into the scene and applied his bullshit ‘magic’ and whatever else it might have been to people like Jean Michel Basquiat. It was a period that, in the end, will be looked back at as just important for New York and American culture as, say, Dada was for Europe, etc, historically speaking.
How explosive was that stuff, really? Well you had dozens of people in it, and that’s it. Judy [Nylon] says there were 100 people in the New York Noise liner notes. I’m not sure that I could count 100, but it is true that all of these things happened from a very few people who were able to sparkplug things into happening.
I think that it was a compressed and explosive time that I would really like to see represented in the right way. The “right way” meaning: just to show how open and how easy it was, and how compelled we were to move during that time. Sometimes we felt that we were moving as quickly as possible, like “We have to do it now, because there might be a nuclear meltdown in the next few months!” Remember Three Mile Island?
Popcorn Youth: Have you seen the documentary “Kill Your Idols”? Basically it makes sweeping connections from 80s musicians such as Arto Lindsay and Lee Ranaldo to people like the Liars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. How accurate is that connection, from your point of view? How connected are those scenes or communities, really, from an historical or aesthetic point of view? Or do people just want to make that connection because they are both ‘arty’ music scenes in New York and they make for good marketing currently?
Stuart Argabright: (Laughing) Right. Well, I didn’t see it, but I’ve heard about the film from a professor at another college. He basically was turning me onto the idea of the movie, which is that they show old stuff and then they show some new stuff, and then they say that this kind of scene came around again. Is that right?
Popcorn Youth: Right.
Stuart Argabright: Well, it did not happen again. It didn’t come around again. There is no connection, really, at all, except that some people like to stay at the very same streets some 20 years apart now. I love some of those groups, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and don’t care for others, but I don’t really see much connection other than the fact that people are living and breathing air (laughs), and living in places with four walls and a ceiling and a floor, and that they eat stuff in one end and it goes out the other—there’s not a real connection between a lot of that stuff from that time, and now.
On the other hand, someone else could easily say, “Oh, there’s tons of connections,” because it’s a place where people can come and make music with great players from around the world and so forth—so isn’t it the same? Et cetera. Well … no. I mean, I listen to the older groups and I listen to the new groups, and it’s actually quite different. I would stretch it to say that I think that some of those groups were pretty inspired by Sonic Youth, and that the whole Sonic Youth continuum is a thing unto itself. Then there’s the Williamsburg contingent and The Rapture, all that stuff now. Even The Strokes or freakin’ Interpol—that’s a number of very different-sounding groups right there. And if you include the DFA crew, though I don’t mean to lump them together because there is diversity there, then you can see that maybe James is picking specific reference points from the 80s.
I love the Yeah Yeah Yeahs because they have a great guitar player, a charismatic front lady, and the drummer is pretty good too, so they make a grand, stylish racket. But a lot of those other groups … I’ve never really heard The Strokes; I’ve heard that one song by The Rapture a few too many times, and some tracks in passing, online. I did a remix in 2002 for LCD Soundsystem’s “Beat Connection,” but unfortunately it was never released. It was exactly what I thought that they should have been doing at the time, but hey, maybe I didn’t have enough cowbell on the track. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: I seem to recall you saying something disparaging about the cowbell at one point. (Laughs)
Stuart Argabright: No doubt. No doubt. I mean, whether it’s from the SNL parody of the Blue Oyster Cult playing cowbell, or whether it’s solo James Murphy saying in the Village Voice something like, “James Murphy wants to kick your ass, but he’ll settle for you buying his album,” it’s like, “Well, whatever there, James, you keep on pumping that iron.” (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Today, is it possible for another cultural movement in NYC along the lines of punk or no wave to happen? Do you forsee something exploding in the city that would be on par with musical revolutions that you were a part of over 20 years ago?
Stuart Argabright: Well, again, on the one hand I do, and on the other hand I don’t. On the hand that I do, over the last couple years I have felt that once New York gets its wind back after 9/11, there will be quite a few new stories to tell. There will be new moods and some need to get past the trauma of 9/11.
And with new technology, new styles of music, and new music in England, I think that there is a “moment” now. I think that this also has to do with the American political situation, with good ol’ Bush being in office. That certainly has created a backlash and an anti-moment.
I can’t tell yet if that’s been dispersed, but I’ve been developing a new group/project called Dystopians. Grown from the notions about a new ‘dark age,’ drawing from an old Dark Ages kind of mood that I feel is happening, that I feel is — how shall I put it — the bullet is in the chamber, it just has to be fired. I don’t really expect a movement out of it, but I do think that there is a big pool of anxiety, post-anger, an unknowing regarding what’s happening next. A moment that is happening here, and a certain kind of music could tap into it, and I’m the kind of person who is always thinking, “Well, what should music be now, today and tomorrow?”
And so as my journey, I am preparing to bring out this new group and I also play the part of the re-release guy, which has been fun. And I’m still involved in the city, and I still find surprises when going out and meeting people. I think that there is potential and a capability still in the city, but I can’t say whether it’s going to be a big sweeping moment or not.
I think that people are so spoon-fed by now that I’m not sure what it’ll take to make them react. I don’t necessarily have a lot of faith that it’ll become something outside of urban centers, but I would like to see it become a human-driven global thing and not just a city thing.
Maybe it wouldn’t just be a New York thing, but it could be a New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and Beijing, Shanghai and wherever else kind of thing. That’s interesting to me, because I don’t only live in New York, I also live in Japan, and in the world as well. So I’m much more interested in what’s happening worldwide on a daily basis than what’s just happening in NYC.
Popcorn Youth: In 1970s or 80s-era NYC, did you find that there was a palpable communication with other global center such as London, Berlin, or Tokyo? Or has this been a more recent phenomenon of the internet-driven 21st century? On what level did that global interaction occur 20 years ago?
Stuart Argabright: There was, but it was really down to the individuals who were able to go back and forth, they helped spread things around the planet.
For example, Judy Nylon, who was from Boston, she moved to London and got involved with everybody from Brian Eno to John Cale. And then she came back to New York in time to befriend and take under her wing Sid Vicious, when he was here. There were people like that in the 60s. An older brother or sister would get back from London and bring back records. I had a hippie-ish older sister, so I heard Jimi Hendrix and all of those groups. You also had the exchange on generational levels. You had the exchange within different strata of friends and so forth. It obviously wasn’t organized and as detailed information-wise as the Internet but the world seemed bigger. Places like West Berlin seemed quite far away!
Like Tokyo — there used to be some freaky people from Japan playing music, but it was a bit of an oddity and an entire universe away from the United States. But interactions had already begun, with executives and salarymen being sent to the States. People were going back and forth, and the seeds were being sown for the later global interactions that pretty much dominate now.
Myself, I got to Japan for the first time, finally, in 1987, and have invested a good deal of time in Asia because we knew it was coming on strong.
Popcorn Youth: You mentioned that you still like to go out and explore New York City. How much are you aware of newer, younger NYC bands? Do you try to go to gigs and keep up with everything, or is that unrealistic?
Stuart Argabright: Oh, perhaps not enough. Still, I have a pretty detailed eye on what’s going on – even if I don’t actually go out to each and every thing, impossible in NYC right? Some genres I don’t really care for, and that’s fine.
Popcorn Youth: Do you follow noise scenes in Brooklyn, for example?
Stuart Argabright: Well, some. For example, Death Comet Crew was on the label Troubleman Unlimited, and they had early Orthrelm, Lightning Bolt–type stuff, those kind of things. Within the scene, what do you consider noise? Black Dice? Or Gang Gang Dance?
Popcorn Youth: I don’t really consider Gang Gang Dance “noise.”
Stuart Argabright: Right.
Popcorn Youth: It’s hard to say. It’s another scene that seems easy (and fashionable) to overgeneralize about, yet difficult to define for a number of specifiable reasons. Mouthus, Double Leopards, bands on Important Records, No Fun Productions, Troubleman Unlimited, which you mentioned . . . .
Stuart Argabright: Right, yes. As someone who has gone to noise shows since 1978, I’ve kind of seen it all, in its glory and in its ridiculousness, and there’s only a certain amount that you can do with that, to some extent.
But I love some other things, like Boris from Japan and dark stuff like Sunn 0))). I’ve always been into death metal and black metal ideas—we had a heavy group called Black Rain in the 80s, until the early 90s.
I’ve been on the electronic scene, on the edges of no wave, I’ve been in the industrial, the post-industrial, punk, technoid, electroid scenes, and I try to keep a hand in and keep up with different things.
What I think about now, for example, with Ike Yard, is whom do we want to play with? I’ve got to be thinking about, “Well, alright, what is Hisham [Bharoocha] from Black Dice doing? He’s got his new project Soft Circle, so maybe we’ll do a show with him.” Or, “Okay, Psychic Ills—Treyce and Taketo Shimada have a project called Messages, maybe they’d like to play with us sometime …” and so forth.
I’m actively looking and checking things out, but there’s not that much that really catches me. If there is, I’ll go out there and see it, but I can still pretty much stay home six nights a week and have a lot of fun making music and doing whatever it is that we do here at the house. I keep up with what’s happening around the world, music-wise, in part because I’m looking for new people to play with and to collaborate with.
Now that we’re doing live shows again, with both Death Comet Crew and Ike Yard, I have to keep my hand in what’s happening in Europe as well. I need to know who are the bands to play with, where are the good venues, where do we want to go, and where are the venues that we do not want to go.
Popcorn Youth: What was the impetus for reuniting Ike Yard, and why now?
Stuart Argabright: Well, the re-release cycle started for me with “Anti New York.” That came out in 2000 in Germany, and in 2001 here, on the label Gomma, this great little label—which also put out this compilation, Basquiat’s group Gray.
I saw Michael Holman from Gray on 14th St., and he said, “Oh, Stuart, you have to get in touch with these guys, they are doing a CD re-release of our old music, and I’m sure that they’d want to have some of your stuff.” And so I made contact with them, and I got Ike Yard and Death Comet Crew on that compilation. So then, Death Comet Crew took off first, and we were able to reform and tour around the world, just with the new album.
We released a single last year in Berlin, put out some Japanese releases with Delic, and had just finished touring Europe again, were on a bit of a roll, so then it became time to re-release Ike Yard. That was the logical thing to do. So now that we’ve done that, we will be recording the day after that we’re up there in Ithaca with you, at the studio over at Delhi, New York. We’re recording now, we just did our first photo session, the group is back.
We wanted to make sure that we could plant the flag down historically, to say, “Yes, we did exist.” Nobody knew us, but we were on all of these labels perceived as being cool and we did great stuff. And we think that people should hear it because it sounds good now, maybe it even makes more sense now to listeners than it did back then.
Well certainly it makes more sense now in the context of looking back, and listening to it, in today’s context. Hybrid electronic musics hadn’t been around for so very long in 1981 or 1982. So after the re-release came out and did quite well, at least critically, I did “New York Noise Vol. 3,” and I did the double punch with having a couple of IY tracks on there too.
We got together in the fall, and the first time we played, it was like we picked up where we were 25 years ago, and we saw that we should keep going with it. Death Comet Crew is in another phase in terms of active work.
I can also now do Dystopians and put together those tracks, keep plowing ahead and making new music with Ike Yard without having to really look back very much. Seizing the moment in this re-release period was critical though.
Popcorn Youth: And how did you get involved with curating New York Noise Vol. 3?
Stuart Argabright: Well, I had been putting together this compilation for a couple of years prior. I produced Rammellzee’s album Bi-Conicals of the Rammellzee in 2002, which was released in 2003.
As soon as that was done, I was working on this compilation, and Shin Shimokawa (Death Comet Crew bassist and Black Rain member) had connected with the Japanese label “A Bathing Apes,” the painfully hip clothing label in Japan.
But in the end they got into trouble, their financial people said that they couldn’t do it, so I looked around the world again and Soul Jazz was already doing “New York Noise.” I contacted Stuart Baker over there and it turned out to be a serendipitous meeting because I had already done all of the work, all they had to do was pay me and put it out. So it wasn’t too tough. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: What factors did you take into consideration when putting together the track listing on New York Noise vol. 3?
Stuart Argabright: Even before I knew it would be out on Soul Jazz, I could see that I was covering what the other previous compilations hadn’t covered. And once I knew it was going to be on Soul Jazz, it was even easier to hone it more and to make sure that I wasn’t using tracks by groups that had already been re-released.
We had a little bit of bleed-over because when they discovered that I wanted to have a certain track by Ut on it, the guy who was putting together the second volume wanted the track too. In the end I let them have it because he couldn’t get a bunch of other tracks, and I didn’t have any problem getting tracks because I knew all the artists—I could just call them up and say, “Hey, what are you doing, you still living in that place? What’s a good track for this?” (Laughs) The women of Ut were still my friends, and Judy is my friend, so it was very easy to contact them. They stuck with the project in the lean years!
I didn’t have a list of people I wanted to contact — I could just think in general about what the quality stuff was and go for that. And, as usual, there weren’t too many others fishing in that end. People are always going for the brightest, brashest, stupidest thing, either that or what’s known through reading Pitchfork. And that’s not always the quality stuff, so I have no problem with that, because that’s where I gravitate and try to stay—with the quality material.
Regarding the period that I was collecting, I knew that I wanted to be a bit at the end of no wave, but also to include a bit of the avant beginnings of electro. Not the hip-hop electro, but the more art/street electro that was coming out of New York at that time: Martin Rev, Dark Day, Ike Yard. The stuff that was somewhat unclassified or not necessarily a part of any movement. But in a way, it was a movement because there were similar technologies being used. There were only X amount of drum machines and synthesizers made at that point. So there was some rough common ground among those groups.
In our own case, we were treated nicely from the people in Suicide. Alan spoke to Ken after we played and had dug it. I hope there might be some kid out ther who listens to our music and thinks, hey this makes me want to go to New York and make some music,” to which I’d say, “Welcome to New York!” Don’t expect the same atmosphere, but yes, you can still come here and find something. By all means, get out of wherever you’re at if you don’t like it. Come and transform yourself.
Popcorn Youth: Regarding Ike Yard and other projects, did 20th century contemporary classical composers play a role in your music?
Stuart Argabright: Whether it’s as simple as Erik Satie or hardcore musique concrete or Xenakis and Stockhausen, to me, it was impressive to hear those records, yes. It wasn’t something that you listened to all the time, but you had to at least know that it existed, how far it went, and you could use the material as a fertilizer for making your own thing.
By the time that Michael and Fred joined Ike Yard, they had come out of electronic music courses up at Brown University. But we didn’t listen to those records and get literal about taking this or that.
But we did have inspirations. On the Factory album, the track “Kino,” we were into the idea of taking big cymbal sounds in the studio and stretching and slowing them down and turning them into tones, a la Xenakis, who used the sound of burning charcoal or a kernel of a sound and then turned it into something else.
But some of us in Ike Yard had been taking those perhaps difficult kinds of music and turning it into “body” music, even song structures. So therein was the tension — colder ‘academic’ sound inspirations mixed with a sexed-up, going-out-every-night reality that we were into, too.
I think in the end, that balance was what helped the music sound good now, because I think people are always going to get lonely in a big city and want to go out and connect with other people. I think that that’s a lot of what the fuel for the early Ike Yard was, as if, “Hey, it’s not good enough to sit here alone tonight. I’m going to go out and who knows — I might meet somebody.” Or you might have a hell of a dog night. Someone you meet might be a total nightmare. At the same time, it might be somebody that you are with the rest of your life. You couldn’t really tell.
Back then, it was much more of a hot spot in terms of “We have to be there, right now, in NYC.” It’s more diffused now, and at the same time, more global, too.
Popcorn Youth: Today, what are your thoughts on the presence of the Internet with respect to contemporary urban culture, whether it is music, fashion, or anything else? Ike Yard now has a MySpace, you run a blog, you participate in music forums. In your opinion, has that changed how people approach or create music? For example, I can go online right now and buy an Ike Yard record with one mouse click on iTunes, or I can buy it from Acute and have it mailed to Minnesota, whereas before, it was more limited to certain parts of major urban centers. It must seem very different now from the time when Ike Yard existed. In terms of accessibility, how has this affected the musical cultures you participate in?
Stuart Argabright: Well, it’s certainly a big improvement, I think, for people to be able to buy Ike Yard on iTunes or through the Acute Records website, or on any number of other electronic music sites, it’s so much better than it was when we made the music in ‘80 and ’82, when we were in the old music business. Basically, the label gives you the money to record, so shouldn’t I be impressed and act impressed right now?
So you still kind of had to be on the old plantation back then, you know? They owned the means of production, meaning: they had the money to put you in the studio. You couldn’t really do it very often, you could go to a crappy place, but if you knew anything about sound and you had a direction for what you wanted to sound like, you wanted to go to a good place. So they already had you in whatever the situation was, whether it was being signed with a major label, or doing a one-off with an indie label — you had to have your wits about you and make your way through it.
Of course now, once the music is out, a big reason why we’ve been spending a lot of time in the last five years to do these re-releases, is so that the music can be available forever, basically. I don’t know about the year 3000, if it’ll still be around or not (laughs), but at least now, it has a little chance to be around for the next little while.
Before we did these re-releases—the Death Comet Crew of 1984 from Beggars Banquet, the Ike Yard Crepuscule 12,'’ and the Factory America album, they were all basically gone—and only dozens of people had heard them. Whereas now, hundreds or thousands of people have heard it. And it’s another generation, they are actually actively seeking this stuff, and it’s new to them.
We’re off of the majors [labels]. We don’t have to play their game, and the artists don’t have to play their game. The artist can do their own thing, publish their own stuff, do their own press. When I was doing forums, I wanted to be careful, trying not to come off a certain way. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: So I suppose the flip-side of the Internet is that now, there is so much more stuff, and some of it is not good at all—whereas, as you pointed out, there couldn’t have been more than a small community of people involved in the cross-pollinating communities you witnessed during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Now it seems like the Internet is a tool that anybody can use to put up their MySpace page—there’s no filter, and this has different meanings for different people.
Stuart Argabright: Of course, that’s true. But I mean, I don’t think that it’s the result of any one phenomenon. There was a point when electronic music itself was an activity that could only be done by a few very specific people. But with the DIY period and post-punk and electro and post-Kraftwerk modes coming in, people found they could do it as an individual or as a group. And there was a point around the time of Aphex Twin, when he was hot, and suddenly it seemed like there was an entire generation of bedroom producers who came up in the next instant. And I think that there was actually a swell of dozens if not hundreds or thousands of white males in their bedrooms creating music. Some of it was good, but some was absolute crap. And then, of course, the Internet gave them a chance a few years later to throw it all up online — but I still think really nothing but good in the end could come from that.
You do have to wade through the good and the bad, but it’s just like spam. What can you do? You have to go through it. But there is one possible downside I see, not necessarily of the Internet, but more of just our hounding of culture — looking for the next big thing, the next cool thing. What happens is that an underground scene won’t have a chance to gestate or create it’s own power before it gets sucked up, or spit out. Around ‘88 or ’89, what had been the edge of underground, nicely untouchable and out of reach from the people out in Iowa or North Dakota, suddenly it became overground. Everybody had tattoos and the hard guys had a pitbull.
Ever since then, the turnover from underground to overground has just been too quick, to where the glaring eye of the all-seeing media picks up everything far too quickly.
And another phenomenon that I’ll touch on, is that when the first things come out of a genre, or even before it’s a genre, suddenly something gets picked or hoisted up into the night, and suddenly everything after that has to refer to that thing. That’s now the standard, and as opposed to being like 10 flavors, it becomes 3 or 4 flavors — or even 1 flavor. And I think that this is very bad, and I don’t think it is the fault of the Internet per se, but the ever-marching eye of the media. Of course, the Internet is a part of that, too.
So that all gets wrapped up together, but really, anyone making music these days should have no complaint at all, because if their music is any good, it’ll be heard. If you’re in an orchestra pit grinding out some pieces somewhere, doing “Annie” songs, or whatever, hey, don’t worry, you’ll still have a job. The advent of electronic music didn’t put you out of a job. The rock ‘n’ rollers will go on, too. It’s the record labels—the plantation owners, as I call them—that are getting out of a job. And that’s really good because they’ve been screwing everyone over since the days of blues and jazz. Thankfully the plantation is being dismantled.
Popcorn Youth: Did you feel that with your gang in the late 70s and 80s, that those bands and that community were largely kept out of the media spotlight and media eye?
Stuart Argabright: Yes. Almost 100% out of the big media eye. Lydia Lunch or James Chance hardly ever received any coverage, except maybe Soho News, or something like that. Magazines like Bomb and others, you would look at them at the newsstands, and also maybe you stole of a copy (laughs) . . . so yes, it was pretty much under the radar. James Chance got some notoriety for beating some people, getting his nose bloodied by a critic, but those records didn’t sell very many copies regardless. It wasn’t played on the radio per se, there wasn’t any way to disperse it, really.
But by the time I did Dominatrix, there was a pop moment that came into being that led to people like Madonna. There was a period there of Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson — when a huge, huge pop moment was going on. Some of those roots of some of those people unconsciously or semi-consciously, but it was definitely coming out of the super underground scenes. Pop culture was just a step away only a few years later, not long after no wave.
Popcorn Youth: Do you worry that people will mythologize that period of the late 70s/early 80s as a dangerous, exciting, Wild West sort of time? Is that a phenomenon that you’ve seen happen? Especially since the incredible increased costs of living in Manhattan…?
Stuart Argabright: (Laughs) Yes. Yes, it is definitely something that I’ve seen happening. But please, go on.
Popcorn Youth: I’m not sure, but maybe with bands such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who have adopted some of the performative signifiers characteristic of the period, with this type of thing, do you worry that people romanticize or mythologize the past in a way that is not true to the spirit of the time?
Stuart Argabright: People do idealize it and mythologize that period, of course. There’s nothing we can personally do about that. But I don’t think it’s a very useful thing to build it up to be more than what it was.
At the same time, I totally despise it when I see a genre name like “disco punk,” which to me is completely ridiculous because those two things did not go together back in the day. A certain person might think that my statement sounds like an old person’s point of view, but the reason why I say it is that I remember very clearly that you were in one camp or another. And disco . . . well, it definitely did not go anywhere near punk and the people that were involved. (Laughs)
And so to some extent, that’s where I have a big problem with the Interview Magazine people and the Andy Warhol crew when they came down to the Mudd Club and got involved in the whole scene, because they already had their own thing going on. They should have just stayed where they were, as far as I’m concerned.
Once they came down, they attracted all of the bad things that were associated with disco, like people taking poppers. It’s one thing to have one-night sex with all of your friends and whomever else, but the way that those people did it, it was… well, I’m not exactly sure what it was that they did, I didn’t want to get too close. (Laughs) In general, there was a vampirish sleazy thing that was going on. Keith Haring and Basquiat died very early, before they should have. And I will definitely go on record as saying that the passing of people like Basquiat, that their passing had to do with the people who got him involved in some pretty bad stuff and who knows what else.
So when the whole revival wave that came out years back, which was based in large part on 1980s New York city music — whether they were basing it on what they thought was minimal no wave, or noise rock, or something like Gang of Four — yeah I thought it was well and good, because maybe people had some resonance with that feeling of anger. Or that maybe they were thinking, “Hey, punk, man, I feel very punky or post-punky!” Well, that’s great, but you have to do something with it, you have to make it your own and go on with it.
And there’s another thing that you’re asking me about at the moment, and that is the whole phenomenon of the marketing and consumption of the 80s. Whether it’s like the show NYU had, the downtown show, or, for example, we just came back from Portugal, and the night after we played there, they were playing the two movies “Downtown 81” and “Wild Style.” Some people try to own a part of the 80s and say “Oh yes, I did this, I was there.” For myself, that means that there are many pieces of the 80s, and I’m going to make sure that mine’s out there too, because it’s not just owned by three or four people. There are many stories and that was really the best thing about it—there were so many different stories and everyone had a different one to tell. It wasn’t some blanket experience, like you might see on VH1 these days.
Popcorn Youth: To change subjects for a moment, what is your live set-up is like these days, in terms of gear? Is it different than it was in the 80s, i.e., you are exploring new technology not available then, or are you trying to recapture a certain period of the Ike Yard sound?
Stuart Argabright: We’re certainly not trying to recreate anything. When we got back together and started playing again, we did fine—it was a unique situation because we were able to jump back into it. At the same time, we were all thinking, “Well, what should Ike Yard be doing now, in 2007?” How did we think back then in 1982? How do we think now?
Live, we will just be the combination of what equipment we have at the moment. And it’s happened to work out very well right now because it’s similar to the first time around, in that we all just have a couple of things here and there. When we decided to get back together, I had my computer with a couple of programs, including Reason, which is what I make my drum programs on.
I have a big Yamaha keyboard that has a bunch of great synth sounds in it. Ken happened to have an old device, basically a techno DJ device called the Jambox, a laptop including sound banks which he also uses for working on his films. And Michael, who is also in Death Comet Crew with me, he had the Arp synthesizer still.
So we’re able basically to cobble together a whole new lineup. In the old days, you only had a certain number of brands of electronic equipment, and now we have a few more. By mixing the brands and mixing the sounds, there’s a unique palette — no other group has the palette that we have right now.
So we’ll be bringing that up there to you in Ithaca and hopefully the music will be loud enough to help people ride the wave and pulse that we create without it sounding too small. It’s a peculiar kind of electronic music that is of-the-moment, plastic, and fluid, and sometimes based on certain kinds of song modes.
Two of us like to sing or do some sort of vocals, and the vocals have evolved from the deadpan observatory-type lyrics that I used to do. Now we sing more and our other vocal modes have all evolved a bit.
I think when you hear the new stuff—if you’ve heard anything from the MySpace page — you can still tell it’s Ike Yard. So far we’ve made our first five pieces, 10 pieces, 15 pieces. It’s pretty easy for us to tell which pieces we’re going to stick with, what we’re going to do live, and what is just a sketch, because we do a lot that it is just experiments that we don’t necessarily do again. We’ll be doing all of that live, too.
Our MySpace page is all a part of a crop of new material that we’ve come up with. We set it up so that one of the first things that we would do as a group would be to record at WFMU, and that was at the end of January 2007. We have about six shows set up for the rest of the year, including probably a European tour in October. We go to Lyon, France to play the festival Nuits Sonores, on May 16 with Tony Conrad, an old school violin drone guy and some DFA DJs, one of whom is Marcus L (Shit Robot), a friend from the club days here in the 90s.
We’re just getting out there again. We did have some excitement that the sound would go further this time than it did last time, and we’re just as into it now as we were then. It’s pretty amazing that the music stands up and still sounds good, and that we could get back together and create new stuff. The fire is still hot. (Laughs)